Alka Kanaya and collaborators recently published an American Diabetes Association (ADA) position statement recommendation for lowering the BMI cut point for diabetes screening in Asian Americans to >23 kg/m2 entitled “BMI Cut Points to Identify At-Risk Asian Americans for Type 2 Diabetes Screening” in Diabetes Care. The ADA has adopted this recommendation as part of the association guidelines for diabetes screening.

Congratulations to ARCH investigators for their recent publications and presentations!

Several ARCH investigators were featured in the Cancer in Asian and Pacific Islander Populations section of the November 2014 issue of Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

Tung Nguyen published a commentary entitled “Cancer in Asian American and Pacific Islander Populations: Linking Research and Policy to Identify and Reduce Disparities.”

Scarlett Lin Gomez and collaborators from Sutter Health and Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute examined rates of compliance with cervical, breast, and colorectal cancer screening among Asians from an electronic health record population and compared them with non-Hispanic whites.

Thu Quach and colleagues published “Disaggregating data on Asian American and Pacific Islander women to provide new insights on potential exposures to hazardous air pollutants in California” and found there was substantial variation between tracts for disaggregated AAPI groups, with notably higher exposure potential index scores for tracts enumerated for Korean or Japanese women compared with other AAPI groups.

Winston Tseng and colleagues from the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum presented “Identifying Vulnerable Asian Americans under Health Care Reform: Working in Small Businesses and Health Care Coverage” which was recently published in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved.

Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations represented by Jeffrey Caballero and Winston Tseng representing UC Berkeley were speakers at the Asian American and Pacific Islander Leadership Roundtable.

Leaders from the Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations presented “Working Together on the Success of the ACA: A National Plan of Outreach, Education, and Enrollment for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders – the Community Health Center Perspective” and “Social media as a content and information dissemination tool for coalitions working with Limited English Proficiency (LEP) communities” with staff from the Hepatitis B Foundation.

Rod Lew from Asian Pacific Partners for Empowerment, Advocacy and Leadership presented a session focused on “Investing in Leaders: The APPEAL Policy Change Model” and “Engaging priority populations in tobacco control advocacy and policy: The LAAMPP experience.”

Arnab Mukherjea and Elisa Tong published a special communication “Paan (pan) and paan (pan) masala should be considered tobacco products” in Tobacco Control. This article calls for a universally standard classification of these smokeless carcinogenic products as tobacco products and thus, subject to the same public health and clinical protections applied to other forms of tobacco.

Lead by Melinda Bender, co-authors JiWon Choi, Yoshimi Fukuoka and others published “Digital technology ownership, usage, and factors predicting downloading health apps among Caucasian, Filipino, Korean, and Latino Americans: the digital link to health survey” in JMIR Mhealth Uhealth. Results indicated that despite a narrowing racial/ethnic “digital divide”, some disparities still exist, particularly among racial/ethnic groups with less education and whose primary language is not English.

Alka Kanaya and collaborators from Northwestern University report on the association of 10-year and lifetime predicted cardiovascular disease risk with subclinical atherosclerosis in South Asians using data from the Mediators of Atherosclerosis in South Asians Living in America (MASALA) study in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum with collaborators from the New York University Center for the Study of Asian American Health published “Recommendations for implementing policy, systems, and environmental improvements to address chronic diseases in Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders” in Preventing Chronic Disease.

Scarlett Lin Gomez and collaborators examined the role of comorbidities in breast cancer survival by race/ethnicity in a manuscript published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. The risk of breast cancer-specific mortality increased among breast cancer cases with a history of diabetes which was similar across race/ethnicity.

Alka Kanaya and co-authors used the MASALA cohort to elucidate the role of sociodemographic, lifestyle, and cultural factors in prediabetes and diabetes in South Asian immigrants published in Annals of Epidemiology.

Alka Kanaya and co-authors also used the MASALA cohort to examine the associations between endogenous sex steroid hormones with diabetes risk in Diabetic Medicine.

Scarlett Lin Gomez and colleagues reported on birthplace and esophageal cancer incidence patterns among Asian-Americans using the California Cancer Registry from 1988-2004.

Along with these papers by ARCH investigators, the abstract highlights include:

Using linked birth-hospital discharge data for 89,703 live births in New York City from 2001-2002, living in a residential ethnic enclave was associated with increased odds of gestational diabetes among South Central Asian and Mexican immigrant women but not African, Chinese and other Hispanic migrant women.

Zhou et al investigate the geographic variation in diabetes prevalence and detection among 98,058 adults from 162 areas in mainland China. A clear negative gradient in diabetes prevalence was observed from 13.1% in the urban high-socioeconomic circumstance (SEC) to 8.7% in rural low-SEC areas. Compared with detection of 40.8% in urban high-SEC counties, detection was poorest among rural low-SEC counties at just 20.5%.

In a cross-sectional study, using ambulatory electronic health record data from northern California with disaggregated Asian subgroups, achievement of blood pressure control was lower among Filipino women and non-Hispanic Black men compared with non-Hispanic White women and men.

In a cross-sectional survey of 124 South Asian women in New Jersey and Chicago, most women perceived high benefits of screening mammography but also perceived lower susceptibility to breast cancer in the future.

Tomioka et al reported on the impact of the implementation Stanford Diabetes Self-Management Program with minimal adaptation for 96 Asian and Pacific Islanders at a community health center with significant behavioral and clinical improvements at 6 months.

In an analysis of the California Health Interview Survey and US Census data, Asian Americans in highly concordant neighborhoods were more likely to lack a usual source of care but did not lack doctor visits or experience delays in medical care and prescriptions.

In a manuscript published in the American Journal of Public Health, Cook et al found that drinking cultures in the country of origin may have enduring effects on drinking among Asian Americans.

Using the Population-Based Study of ChINese Elderly (PINE) study of 3,159 older Chinese immigrants in the greater Chicago area, the prevalence of elder mistreatment among community-dwelling Chinese older adults was 15%.

In a 10 year retrospective cohort study of 922 randomly selected Asian patients in Malaysia, the pooled cohort risk score to estimate the 10-year atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk appeared to overestimate cardiovascular risk but this apparent over-prediction could be a result of treatment.

In the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation (SWAN), US-born Latina, Chinese, and Japanese immigrants were more likely to report sleep complaints than their first-generation ethnic counterparts, a finding largely explained by language acculturation and unmeasured factors associated with language acculturation.

More Mexican American (66.7%) and Vietnamese American patients with type 2 diabetes (73.7%) than non-Hispanic Whites (NHW) (11.8%) described complementary and alternative medicine practitioners as being closer to their cultural traditions than Western practitioners, whereas Vietnamese patients were more likely to describe use of herbs and supplements as closer to their cultural traditions compared to Mexican Americans and NHWs.

Bivariate secondary analyses of the National Comorbidity Survey-Replication and the National Latino and Asian American Study (2001-2003) indicated that Asians were the least likely to report being assessed, counseled, and recommended medications and specialty care by Meyer et al.

Heart disease and stroke mortality rates for the 6 largest Asian-American subgroups from 2003 to 2010 were examined using both U.S. Census data and death record data. Asian Indian men and women and Filipino men had greater proportionate mortality burden from ischemic heart disease. The proportionate mortality burden of hypertensive heart disease and cerebrovascular disease, especially hemorrhagic stroke, was higher in every Asian-American subgroup compared with non-Hispanic Whites.

Among working-age (18-64 years old) Native Hawaiians and Asians with diabetes in Hawaii, preventable hospitalizations rates were significantly higher for Native Hawaiians males compared to Whites, but significantly lower for Chinese men and women, Japanese men and women, and Filipino men and women; Rates for Native Hawaiian females did not differ significantly from Whites.